Cunt
by Lone Gunwoman of the Week
Summary: SLASH Dark and nasty. Abuse is systemic, with a long line of progenitors. Brief mention of intersex!Rick.


Title: Cunt  
Author: Rebecca Thecountergoddess  
Fandom: The Young Ones  
Pairing: Rick/Vyvyan  
Rating: R for mentions of sex, extreme language, graphic depictions of child abuse, angry!Vyv, Rick in a skirt.  
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these guys.. explain that to the two muses making out on my bed.  
Summary: Dark and nasty. Abuse is systemic, with a long line of progenitors.

Vyvyan didn't dream very often. It was more his wont to immediately pass out once he kipped up in his room at the end of the day, too knackered or inebriated for his brain to hiccup a single mental image. But when he did, the dreams were always a bit wonky.

Tonight he was back at his old public school, waiting outside the headmaster's office to be bawled out for who knew what. He'd been there so many times, for running away or smoking in the lavvy. From the look of his hands and clothes, he'd guess the grand offense this time was vandalism. Now was that Year 5 or 6? He'd gone quite mad with a can of spray paint for a while there. The person across from him slurped on an ice lolly sucking so hard it hollowed out their cheeks -- gray-blue eyes locked on Vyvyan's -- only to have to torn from their hand by a passing prefect.

"No sweets before dinner, Miss Sorenson."

Vyvyan laughed at Rick's flustered disgust.

As prissy as he was, Rick didn't make a particularly convincing girl: a noticable dusting of tawny hair covered his legs above his dark knee socks. He had a stiffie tenting his green tartan uniform skirt. He would probably fall on his face if he tried to stand up in the four-inch Mary Janes he was wearing. However, the proper pigtails tied with yellow ribbons and pert tits beneath his school blazer were pure girlie issue.

Vyvyan didn't know which he wanted to do first: yank or squeeze. He finally grabbed one in each hand, not sure how or when he'd crossed the hall. Dream Rick tore his blouse open and started grinding against his thigh; opening his mouth wide as the punk stuck his tongue down the boy/girl's throat.

"Mr. Basterd, Miss Sorenson, would you kindly contain yourselves until after first period?"

Vyvyan was about to tell the old fucker to sod off when his here-to-fore very enjoyable dream was interrupted by a stray elbow landing in his stomach...

--

Fucking hell. Vyvyan rubbed his eyes, nails digging into his retinas and resisted the urge to punch the squirming lump pressed into his side on the bed.

He'd gotten used to mornings like this one, startling awake with wiry long-limbs draped over him and lank, musty-smelling hair under his chin. Rick, he thought, in his quieter moments looked like a 12-year-old, much nerdier John Hurt. Splayed out like a science project, waiting for the alien larvae to burst from his chest.

It was sort of fascinating just to stare at him, absorbing the image until Rick would wake up and start running off at the mouth.

Like now. His housemate stirred against his shoulder, awakening with a sniff and lifting his head to blearily stare at the punk's neck, his chin, his left ear.

"What?"

"Nothing!" Rick shot back defensively. Coughing thickly, he stroked Vyvyan's arm, reaching under the covers for his hand.

It still took a lot of restraint to keep from pushing Rick's hands away. The softness of it vaguely repulsed him even as it felt very nice at the same time. The touch of Rick's fingers on his chest and shoulder that first morning had resulted in the poet being thrown across the room. No explanation was given and Rick had nervously laughed off the blow at the time, just limping back to his feet and sheepishly climbing back into bed.

"How'd you get this scar here?" he asked, turning his wrist over to show him. As if he didn't already bloody know it was there.

Vyvyan scowled.

It was pretty standard now: Rick's "morning-after" bollocks. As standard as shaking the bits out of the bedclothes or filling in the chalky white stains on his jeans and vest with a magic marker. It was a bit of a pain. Okay, it'd been a pain in the arse from the beginning, months before. Rick, who was obviously never told to put his toys away as a child, seemed to get a rise out of talking Vyvyan to death. His life before moving into the share house proved to be fertile ground for the anarchist's limited imagination: prodding and poking and scratching for bits of his life with a kind of smitten, fascinated awe, all the while cleverly managing to never offer up anything about himself to share.

Not that Vyvyan had ever asked Rick either; never poked and pried with the raw, exposed need the poet seemed to have by the sodding tankload. He knew everything he needed to about Rick and the rest was easily guessed.

Like Rick's reaction to any clampdown on Vyvyan's part: he'd predicted the familiar childish rants, the bristling, pouty silent protests and, eventually, the delighted release as Vyvyan finally drew out his answer to each question, easing the mutilation by wrapping his arms around a squirming shoulder or biting a trembling neck.

Nothing was laughed off now, everything was taken so bloody seriously.

And the bollocks didn't stop at where he went for public school, the first girl he ever got a snog off of, has he ever snogged any other lads, house mates, hamsters, and where'd he get this scar on his wrist? Like those bloody Russian dolls, each answer seemed to lead to a new question, smaller and less significant than the one before it. But those were the ones Rick seemed to cling to with even more ferocity than the answers to the larger ones. After a few days it didn't seem to matter to him that Vyv went to Manchester Prep, yes, he was the first lad Vyv had snogged or that the scar on his wrist was from when his cast was cut off. He would have to know "what cast? Did you break your arm? How the ruddy heck'd you break your arm?!"

"Vyv?"

"Beating it," he finally answered, "got snagged on my zip."

Rick rolled his eyes.

"Be serious, Vyvyan.."

Annoyed (and more than a little dizzy from the imaginary line of questioning) he yanked his arm from the Rick's grasp and swooped in to nip at the anarchist's pouty lower lip, moving south along his jaw and towards his neck.

Unfortunately, the usual methods didn't seem to be cutting it this morning. He'd broken the skin in two or three places and the sociology student was still blathering on "oh... d-don't think you're going to distract me that way, Vyvyan!," the last few syllables ending with a pained squeak.

This time, he did shove the poet to the floor, jumping to his feet to stare down at his bewildered face.

"You really want to bloody know?!"

--

Cyprian was a huge, bulky Glaswegian who'd spent the previous fifteen years playing rugby, getting into street fights and gaining a reputation for being a bolshy, nasty bloke. He looked like he should have been dragging his knuckles behind him on the pavement everywhere he walked. His mum had met him working security for some downmarket boutique she'd ripped off in the shopping district. There wasn't much Cyp liked: he could go on for hours into the night about all the things he hated. The price of lager, the car he drove, the job he was promptly sacked from shortly after moving in with Vyv's mum, the size of the flat all three of them lived in. He had a habit of preceding everybody's name with the word 'fucking,' which came out sounding more like 'fookin' after he'd had a few drinks. His mum was "Fookin' Valerie." Vyvyan was "the fookin' kid."

He liked cards, had several decks from several shops in all different colors and designs stacked up on the chipped Marks and Sparks ripoff endtable in the living room by the time nine-year-old Vyvyan had returned for the Christmas holiday. It only took knocking over one stack of uncased cards -- green, bearing the legend from a topless club in Kent -- scattering them to the four winds, and two fifths of vodka to get Cyp really angry. Fueled by the alcohol and a little more than the usual casual distaste, he'd pulled the young boy up from the floor by his arm, twisting it when he tried to get away and easily snapping the bone below his elbow and above the wrist.

"Well tha's what you get, isn't it?" his mum had asked as her son continued to rub at his pained, swollen arm two days after it'd happened.

Doreen, the teaching student who lived two up from them, fashioned him a sling to wear when he returned to school after the holiday. Dori was several centimeters shorter and two or three stone heavier than his mum, fleshy curves to the older woman's jagged edges. Sometimes she invited Vyvyan up for a sandwich when his mum was at work, nicking clothes and other items from the various shops downtown. It wasn't all out of the kindness of her bloody heart. She'd been dealing out of her flat to pay her tuition costs and couldn't take the chance that the pigs would show up at her door asking questions, even for the starved little boy getting batted about downstairs.

But, it was all for nothing anyway, wasn't it? Everyone got caught eventually.

His blacked eye had faded by the time he started the winter term, a yellowish clot of purple and gray tissue under a blue-green iris. The long scratch on the back of his head from when his mum caught him with a broken bottle was scabbed over and starting to itch underneath his bushy, chin-length blond hair. But it was the sling he presumed -- and the poorly-healed arm encased in it -- that got the most attention.

He remembered the clandestine nature of it all, like those crap repeats of "The Prisoner" on ITV. One of the prefects fetched him from his bed at half past one in the morning and ushered him -- still in his pajamas -- down to the headmaster's office, where the vice headmaster, his block counselor and the night nurse from the infirmary were all waiting.

The camera they used had a large flash bulb that exploded inside his drowsy head like a nuclear blast, the burnt smell of sulphur clinging to his nostrils. They took photographs of his arm, the sling, his healing eye, the bruises that circled his upper arms, a burst blood vessel in his right eye. The nurse trimmed a short landing strip across the back of his head to get to the scab, not being mindful enough to leave some long hair to cover it later. Afterwards, she took him into the toilet and had him strip down to his underpants (and even further) to check for any other possible damage. This excursion was followed by an early morning visit to casualty, where his arm was x-rayed and cased in plaster for the next eight weeks.

He tore the cast off himself three weeks later, when the itching became unbearable: striking at it with fingernails, a brittle, pen blade from art studio and, finally, a small boning knife nicked from the kitchen that had sliced through his wrist much easier than the plaster. His arm still throbbed sometimes when it rained...

--

He recounted every detail with a kind of pre-emptive sadism, anxiously waiting for the blade to fall and for Rick to turn tail and bolt from the room. That's what he wanted, wasn't it? For the nasty tale he was spinning to turn that fragile, half-empty skull into a chamber of horrors from which the sheltered sociology student would never recover.

Instead, the poet just sat there on the floor, unnaturally still; already huge eyes eyes growing wider, the color disappearing from his face leaving him chalky, ghostly pale. His lips were green around the edges and pursed with nausea and it made Vyvyan want to punch him right in the mouth; knock that broad smile down his throat and watch him choke to death on his own enormous front teeth.

But Vyv wasn't Cyp. He wasn't going to pound the blubbering boy who -- through the looking glass of a few lagers -- might actually deserve it. He'd go across the hall and wallop Neil with his bat. He definitely didn't deserve it.

So that's exactly what he did, leaving Rick to stew in whatever malaise that kept him rooted to the spot on the stained rug and slamming the door behind him.

Fuck him, he thought as he shoved Neil off the window sill and into the hedge below. Who'd he think he was, anyway? Just because they shagged almost everynight didn't make him his bloody boyfriend. He wasn't fucking responsible for him...

--

A few weeks after the trip to the hospital came the meeting with his gin-pocked, rather staid headmaster. The only time any student ever saw the bastard was when he was well-protected behind the barricade of his rotting oak desk, fat stuffed into a charcoal suit and faded like the framed postcard of Harold MacMillan he kept in the top drawer. He'd called Vyvyan into his office during the last half of his lunch break. There were bits of toast and blackcurrant jam still stuck in his beard as he spoke.

"Young man, we're going to keep you over the break before spring term," he said, the old fucker's chins flapping distressedly as he attempted to maintain decorum in the face of the situation.

And that was it. Bloody it. No one ever said anything else. From there, it was just understood that he would be kept over during all of the school holidays. His mum was replaced with Sally, a tall gray-eyed girl from the DES office who'd oversee his case for the next nine years. Her cheques from the department kept him -- reluctantly -- in school. Her yellow Ford Taunus tended to show up on the scene whenever he ran away to the city or one of his science projects exploded. Once in a while, she took him to a foster home, usually returning within a day or two when, one by one, each family hit the panic button.

Sally had stuck it out, making sure he passed his A Levels, finding a school that would give him a grant and sitting out the long hours with him and the careers officer, carefully picking out a specialty for him while he distracted himself by shredding the arms of his chair with a switch-blade. Of all the cunts that pretended to care, she'd been maybe the best at it. But even Sally disappeared once her job was finished. Somewhere buried in his room was a Christmas card she'd sent him back during his first year at college. No fat fucker in a red jacket surrounded by squalling kids and "Best Wishes" -- she'd known him better than that. Instead, he gotten a "Punch" Ralph Steadman card with a mad-looking Cheshire Cat on the front, splattered with ink blots. "Stay out of trouble" was written on the inside.

For the first two years, he'd kept it under his bed, mashed between the frame and the wall. The third year, he'd torn the cover off the card and filled in smirking the ghoul's eyes with a silver graphite pencil, pressing down so hard the point tore through the paper...

--

Rick's eyes hadn't changed much since he'd left him that morning, same unblinking watery gray-blue gaze. That was a lie.They were puffy and rimmed red from crying, and softer too as he looked up at Vyvyan standing in the doorway. Softer and slightly less fearful.

He'd also moved from the floor to the bed, sitting on the edge of the mattress, with his elbows balanced on his knees, his chin propped in the palms of his hands. The sound of the door shutting was quiet compared to the slam it had been delivered that morning.

Happy now, you girlie sod? Does it make you feel good, knowing something like that? Knowing that you had the big house and the doting mum and apron strings tied around your girlie wrists so you couldn't wander off and no bruises or busted limbs or box of flashy shoved in your face, but you still ended up here with me?

"Aren't you going to fucking say anything?"

Vyvyan hadn't realized that Rick had gotten up and moved to stand next to him.

But that wasn't true either. He wasn't standing. Rick hadn't moved at all. He was the tosser who'd moved to sit next to Rick on the bed. And the sociology student had curled into his side, his arm tucked into his, chin resting on his shoulder. No fear behind those eyes now.

It took all of five seconds before Vyvyan pushed him back on the bed...

--

"Um... I-I used to wee in my bed at night."

Vyvyan lifted his head from the pillow to stare at the boy in his arms, wrapped around him from chest to back.

"You're telling me this now?"

"Well I never used to do it at home. Just when I was away.. at school."

Vyvyan stared, dumbfounded, for a moment, feeling a fit of hysterical laughter begin to rise the length of his entire body.

"It started when I was eight--"

"Just tell me it's ended."

"You know bloomin' well it has! Will you shut up and let me finish the story, Vyvyan?"

"All right, I'm sorry," his lips grazed the side of Rick's forehead briefly before he pulled back. "Go on."

"Anyway..," Rick hesitated before continuing. "The first time it happened, it was the second night I spent at primary school. It was horrible. Mum switched me over to the day school after that. Then when I was twelve, she thought we'd try it again and sent me to Pocklington."

The punk made an effort to listen, twirling one of his pigtails around his fingers and biting the inside of his cheek.

"It happened again that first night. But Daddy'd already paid for a full year's tuition this time and wouldn't let me switch out, so I didn't have a choice. I stopped all liquids at afternoon tea and prayed for a miracle.. Eventually it just sort of .. went away on it's own, I suppose. Damn it, Vyvyan, stop laughing!"

The outburst only made the punk laugh harder. Rick sat upright in a huff, clutching the end of the duvet over his chest. As he attempted to climb over his bedmate, Vyvyan reached out an arm and hauled him back down to the mattress, still giggling. Rick humphed indignantly, burroughing his face between Vyvyan's neck and the pillow.

"Rick."

"Yeah?"

"Why the bloody hell are you telling me this now?"

"Well you're still in bed with me, aren't you?"

Vyvyan swatted him on the back of his neck.

"Shut up, you girlie."

--

That night, Vyvyan dreamed he was bending Rick over his headmaster's desk, tartan skirt hiked up, still with those poncey yellow ribbons in his hair.


End file.
